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Sacred sites tidied up in employment program

For decades Alice Springs has faced a worsening problem... how to look after the more than one hundred sacred sites dotted around the town. Litter, development and vandalism have degraded sites of great importance to the local Indigenous people. Now a new employment program developed by the locals is taking charge of the problem, and it's had some early success.

Transcript

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TONY EASTLEY: For decades Alice Springs has faced a worsening problem: how to look after more than 100 sacred sites dotted around the town.

Litter, development and vandalism have degraded sites of great importance to the local Indigenous people.

Now a new employment program developed by the locals is taking charge of the problem, and it's had some early success.

Here's Caddie Brain:

CADDIE BRAIN: Doris Stuart is standing in a dry Coolabah swamp in the middle of Alice Springs. As the senior custodian for the local Arrernte people. She's responsible for places like this.

DORIS STUART: It's a natural water holding place. Water used to just lie naturally along this Undoolya Road - it would block the traffic. But with development taking place all around here, the water that flowed naturally into the swamp and was kept here has now been taken away by drains, man-made drains.

CADDIE BRAIN: Not only is it bone dry, over the last few decades it's been littered with broken glass and other rubbish. You wouldn't know it, but it's actually one of 136 sacred sites in Alice Springs.

Ben Convery, curator at the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens, says many others are just as degraded.

BEN CONVERY: The management of sites has been an issue in Alice Springs for many generations now. There wasn't really any active management happening. And a lot of people were coming into town and disrespecting that area and that was leading to a lot of problems.

CADDIE BRAIN: For custodians like Doris Stuart the damage to sacred sites is more than an eyesore. She says it's a threat to her culture.

CADDIE BRAIN: But if you drive past the Coolabah swamp this week, you'll notice that things are changing. The rubbish is gone and the grass is cut.

A team of Indigenous men are working with custodians to restore sacred sites as part of a new training and employment program - one that will qualify them in horticulture.

And while accessing so many sites would normally have required a lot of paperwork, Dr Sophie Creighton, from the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority, says the process has now been streamlined.

SOPHIE CREIGHTON: As long as custodians are present supervising the works, we've provided a certificate for work on sites in Alice Springs. We usually do that for discreet areas.

So this is the first agreement of its kind that can combine traditional knowledge for the management of sites with horticultural training and enable a workforce to do what custodians have wanted to do on their country for a very long time.

CADDIE BRAIN: When they're not out on sites, the trainees are in an outdoor classroom at the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens. Mark Hopkins from training organisation Civil Train says it's all about learning by doing real work.

MARK HOPKINS: We don't like the idea of someone digging a hole and then someone else filling it and then someone else digging it and someone else filling it, just in order to get an excavator ticket for example.

We want people who do our programs to be able to come back in six months' time and take pride in some of the work they've done, take some ownership.

CADDIE BRAIN: That sense of ownership seems to be working. Ben Convery says there were nearly 20 break-ins in 12 months at the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens before the men began working on the site.

BEN CONVERY: The sense of community ownership is really increasing there and that has had a direct result. We have had one broken window in the last year and a half since we've been running these programs there. So I think it's fantastic, a huge turn-around.

CADDIE BRAIN: And it's generating plenty of interest. Other groups throughout Central Australia are already calling for the program to be rolled out in their communities.